Journal #8

Reading The Iliad by Homer (translated by Richard Lattimore)

I remember reading The Odyssey in middle school, and how adventurous and thrilling it was, and I started off The Iliad expecting more of the same. However, I realize now that the Odyssey is the thrilling more light hearted follow-up to the more personality driven somber original. The Odyssey was the more digestible book. Also it doesn't describe how one guy killed another guy like a hundred times in detail. Also it (from what I can remember at least) does not have pages dedicated to a catalogue of ships.

One thing that I’m finding interesting about the epic is the sense of morality in the Greeks. The characters (both gods and men) in the epic seem to be motivated much more by a sense of personal honor/pride than by any absolute moral code. In the Iliad, for instance, it is foreshadowed that when Troy is taken, the women will be raped and the children sold into slavery. Desecration of bodies is the norm, and Achilles kidnaps and beheads a dozen Trojan children. None of the men or divines take issue with any of this. Ancient Greece was essentially a conglomeration of city-states, so I would assume each would have its own ideas about morality, but one thing that I find is universally condemned by the Greeks is parricide. For example, Ixion, the first perpetrator of parricide enduring eternal punishment for his evil and of course Oedipus who suffered immensely himself for his own patricide. When looking up information about the Greeks I also came across xenia, or the Greek concept of hospitality. Zeus is said to punish those hosts who prey upon their guests and guests who take advantage of a host. You can see the power of xenia in Greek culture in the Iliad when Glaukos and Diomedes call off their duel after releasing that their ancestors were 'guest-friends'. It seems odd to me that Greeks would feel so strongly about parricide (which is no doubt horrible) and xenia when they don’t seem to care as much about genocide/rape/slavery.